Photo of the Week

This Earth Week, Celebrate Biodiversity

Photo: Chris Murdock

I have really loved my time aboard the Oregon II so far. Each day we pull up something new that I haven’t seen before. At first I thought 12 hour shifts would go by very slowly, but in fact it has been the opposite. Almost every night after my shift I find myself staying back and watching the next few trawls come on deck. The differences of day versus night catches are not surprisingly very different. Just like on land, it is a whole new planet at night under the sea. The night shift so far has gotten a bigger variety of shrimp, where we typically get the larger diurnal fish that are active during the day. The day shift also has the luxury of seeing the transitional period at dusk where a lot of the species that are active during the day travel to the bottom and the species normally inactive during the day begin to become active. Our total catches generally are smaller in a weight sense, but we routinely have 40-50 different species in every single trawl.